As a five-week streak of days with triple-digit temperatures shows no sign of ending, high school football teams across North Texas will prepare for the season with two-a-day practices. Those will occur consecutively in the first five days of practice and ignore safety recommendations from the Dallas-based National Athletic Trainers’ Association.

NATA, which has researched the effects of heat and other dangers to high school athletes, released guidelines in 2009 calling for 14 days of heat acclimatization before full-scale practices. NATA also recommended prohibitions on two-a-days in the first week of formal practice and on back-to-back days.

Two-a-days in the first week combine heat and the possibility that an athlete hasn’t fully recovered from the earlier workout, a potentially dangerous combination, say experts such as Dr. Douglas Casa, chief operating officer of the Korey Stringer Institute of health medicine at the University of Connecticut. Korey Stringer, a Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman, died from exertional heat stroke in August 2001, during preseason drills.

“We’ve had great success at the college level with the implementation of a five-day acclimatization period,” Casa said. “Unfortunately, the knowledge base has not trickled down to high schools yet.”

The NFL’s new collective bargaining agreement allows teams only one full daily practice. The Cowboys have two workouts a day, but one is a walk-through.

NCAA teams aren’t allowed to practice twice a day in the first five days.

But in Texas, in the teenage game of high school football, there are no such restrictions.

Two-a-days have been woven into the fabric of Texas high school football for generations. Coaches who adhere to the practice say they pay attention to their players’ safety and stress their usefulness in preparing for the season. Winning football requires intense work and precise attention to detail in extreme stress, they say.

“We’re preparing for Colleyville [Heritage], our first game, and you hate to say it this way,” Hebron coach Brian Brazil said, “but Colleyville is doing two-a-days, and we need to make sure we’re doing two-a-days, too.”

Class 5A and 4A teams that had spring practice will start workouts Monday, when the forecast calls for a high of 105 degrees.

Deaths in the heat

Prestonwood Christian Academy assistant Wade McLain collapsed and died during Monday’s practice — the Plano school’s first day of drills. The Collin County medical examiner said McLain, 55, died from hyperthermia associated with arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, a combination of heat exposure and artery blockage or hardening probably caused by cholesterol.

According to a CNN.com report, two Georgia high school football players suffered heat-related deaths in the last week, and four high school players in Arkansas were hospitalized for dehydration when temperatures hit 114 degrees Wednesday. The death of a 28-year-old runner in a Missouri endurance race was blamed on heatstroke.

“We think it was the worst week in the last 35 years in terms of athlete deaths,” Casa said in the CNN report.

Carter High School football player Eric Brown died of heat stroke after an August 2004 practice.

Not like the old days

Arlington Sam Houston coach Anthony Criss recalled going through two-a-days during the 1980 heat wave, when he was a player at Fort Worth Dunbar. Criss said practices that summer were brutal, not just in the heat’s intensity, but in the manner they were carried out — tough, lengthy practices in the morning and evening, with limited breaks and limited access to water.

Nonetheless, many area coaches still subject their players to some form of two-a-days, albeit in a drastically stripped-down version.

A two-hour session with an early start time, heavy on conditioning, followed by a second shorter, lighter instructional session is commonplace. Most practices are broken up by an hour to 11/2-hour break indoors, often filled with film sessions and weight lifting.

A common refrain among area coaches is that exposure to difficult practice conditions are unavoidable, with after-school practices and games in the hottest parts of the day in August and September. Starting with two-a-days is a way to combat that, they say.

Ford, whose varsity players come back out for a second practice at 2 p.m., said that he does so to acclimate his players.

“You have to prepare your players for the heat of a Friday night in August,” Ford said. “That’s just a fact of football this time of year.”

Differing guidelines

The UIL has established guidelines for preseason practices outside the school year, recently revised in 2006. Both it and NATA say that a single practice should not exceed three hours. Both agree that a two-a-day should have no more than five hours of total practice time.

But that’s where the guidelines diverge. The UIL does not restrict when two-a-day practices can start. The NATA recommendations set out a stair-step process, with no two-a-days before the sixth practice.

NATA also recommends that two-a-days don’t occur on back-to-back days, something the UIL does not prohibit. In addition, the UIL’s guidelines don’t consider weight training as practice time; NATA does. The UIL mandates an hour-long break between multiple practices on the same day. NATA says that the break should be at least three hours, allowing for the student’s core temperature to drop sufficiently.

Regarding external temperatures, New Jersey athletic trainer Dave Csillan, who co-chaired a NATA committee on proper heat guidelines, said the body cannot acclimate to temperatures rising above 100 degrees. The thought that a second practice in the afternoon better prepares players for heat down the road is false if it is 100 degrees or warmer.

Coaches who point to their teams’ summer strength and conditioning programs as a sufficiently preventive measure do so unwisely, Casa said.

“Sure, you might have 80 to 90 percent of the team that has gone through a rigorous strength and conditioning program, but what about those that haven’t?” Casa said. “Those are the ones to worry about, the kids that are struggling to keep up with their super-fit, super-acclimatized teammates. … There’s always going to be exceptions, and they are going to be behind the eight ball.”

New revelations

Allen, like area powers Euless Trinity and Denton Ryan, doesn’t hold first-week two-a-days and hasn’t since 2003. In 2004, school started early, and coach Tom Westerberg couldn’t figure out a practical way to schedule two-a-days that wouldn’t conflict with classes. So he switched to a one-practice schedule.

“You’re always worried somebody is doing more things than you are, working longer than you are,” Westerberg said. “At the beginning I felt that way.”

His doubts were allayed when his team faced Rockwall in a preseason scrimmage. He saw more energized, excited players.

“We’ve never thought about going to two-a-days since then,” Westerberg said.

Casa said that after the NCAA implemented stricter preseason practice requirements in 2003, many college coaches made a similar revelation.

“[Their players] performed much better, as a general rule,” Casa said.

UIL athletic director Dr. Mark Cousins emphasized that the UIL is proactive in safety for its student-athletes, and has always heeded recommendations from its medical advisory committee. Revisiting the league’s preseason practice policies will happen again in October, Cousins said.

Should the UIL choose to follow NATA guidelines and eliminate two-a-days for the first week of formal practice, several coaches said they wouldn’t protest but wouldn’t actively support a change in policy.

Opening their eyes

Water used to make you weak, old-school coaches would say, and shots to the head were equated with honor. Such marks of toughness are scorned in an era when the importance of hydration and concussion treatment has been widely accepted.

Csillan and others with NATA would like to see two-a-days inhabit the same area of national consciousness. The guidelines recommend only cutting two-a-days from the first five days, an action the association views as sensible yet not something that will rob football players of needed intensity and instruction.

“I think it’s going to take some time,” Csillan said. “We are seeing some improvement, because some states are opening up their eyes.”

Cedar Hill’s Joey McGuire and Skyline’s Reginald Samples, who often practice two-a-days, plan to practice only once each day next because of the heat.

McGuire was picking his child up Wednesday afternoon as he planned to discuss this decision with his assistant coaches. He was thinking about the safety of the other children he cares for, those on his football team.

“I want to make sure we are doing everything possible,” he said, “to protect our kids.”

To post a comment, log into your chosen social network and then add your comment below. Your comments are subject to our Terms of Service and the privacy policy and terms of service of your social network. If you do not want to comment with a social network, please consider writing a letter to the editor.